OS Installation

This page will guide you through an installation of freebsd on a hosted root server or vps. We will use the FreeBSD-14.2-RELEASE-amd64-dvd1.iso installer. You can also find VM images and lighter isos on https://www.freebsd.org/where/ We will apply some custom settings during installatin, but the rest of the guide can also be followed with a default FreeBSD 14.x installation as long as you use ZFS as your (root) filesystem.

Starting the installer

After booting from the installation iso, we are greeted with the folloging sceen:

Select Install

If you use a US ANSI keyboard, you can simply select the default option. If you use a ISO keyboard - like most of europe does, select you keyboard layour from the list.

Use whatever you want to identify the host.

We go with the default selection on this screen. Only select the kernel-dbg and lib32 packages.

ZFS

Since we want to use ZFS for all filesystems on this host, we choose the default option: Auto (ZFS). As the bottom message states, running ZFS works best with a lot of ram. But you don’t have to worry if your host has less than 8GB. The OpenZFS documentation states, that the minimum requirement is 2GB. We won’t activate compression or deduplication, so 2-4GB should be enough to get going.

Enter the name for the ZFS Pool which should be created for the root filesystem. You will get the message in the screenshot, if you run the installer on a system which already contains a pool with this name (e.g: if you reinstall the system). In both cases, select zroot as the name.

On a rootserver or vps with one “disk” attached, these settings are fine. We will be presented additional selections either way. Select >>> Install

Select stripe. Since we are only given a single storage device on this virtual machine, we cannot utilize any redundancy.

This screen will look different based on the connected disk/storage device. On a virtual host, you usually get only a single option. Select it with the space-key so that the selection shows up as [*] and confirm by selecting OK.

Confirm by moving the selection with the left arrow-key to YES and press enter. And let the Installer do its thing:

Root Password

Type a password for the root user. We will actually utilize root on this system, so do not use a throw-away password.

You will be promted two times for the password.

Network configuration

Again, on a hosted system you probably only have one available interface, select it.

Select Yes.

Unless you have a static ip which you need to assign to the host, select Yes.

We currently do not use ipv6 for this setup, so you can easily disable this option. Select No.

Enter the DNS servers you’d like to use, or keep the ones defined by the DHCP server. Confirm with OK.

Timezone

Select your timezone by selecting on of the regions, followed by a country (or additional region).

If the date looks correct, you can select Skip. If it does not show the correct date, double-check if you have selected the correct timezone. If so, you can also set a date here.

Same with the time.

Services & Hardening

Select the following services to start at boot and confirm with OK.

• sshd
• ntpd
• dumpdev

We want to activate a few hardening settings - just in case. Select the following options and confirm with OK:

• 0 hide_uids
• 1 hide_gids
• 2 hide_jail
• 3 reaqd_msgbuf
• 4 proc_debug
• 5 random_pid
• 6 clear_tmp

And let the installre do it’s thing:

User creation

Select Yes. We want to add an additional user which we will use to log into the system.

Enter a username. You can use default values for other options by leaving it empty and pressing Enter. When prompted “Invite into other groups?”. Enter wheel. Members of this group get additional administrative priviledged.

Enter the password for the user.

Confirm by typing yes or pressing Enter.

Afterwards, you can exit the installer.

And confirm by selecting No.

We are now ready to reboot the system. If you have some administration panel to attach/detach ISOs, detach the installation medium. Confirm with Reboot.

Access Configuration

Now lets fix the not-so-complex passwords we set for the user accounts.

Log into the machine through SSH (from you personal hosts shell), either through its IP or through a domainname you have assigned to it. Use the name of the user we created in the User Creation step.

ssh psyon@ez1.ezdk.org

then change the password for that user not that you can paste values to the prompt.

passwd

You’ll get promted to enter you old password and then two times for the new one. The passwords will be invisible.

Do the same for the root account. For this, change to the root user with

su -

And enter the root password that was set during installation.

Use the same passwd command as before and enter a new (longer) password.

Now we are done with the installation of our base system. We can now move forward to the Host Configuration.